CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ambrosia, the Queen

 

Being a vampire had its perks. Endless life (provided he followed the rules). No conscience to worry him (provided he tamped it down into a deep dark hole). He could run fast, jump high, and twist people’s brains like a nipple held betwixt thumb and forefinger. He could even survive, when, say, shot in the chest a dozen times by a .223 Armalite Model 15 assault rifle.

But one thing a vampire could not do: betray the laws of physics.

Normally, bullets didn’t cause him much worry. They didn’t feel great, and getting punched in the trunk with a high-velocity rifle round was certainly distracting, but even still, it wasn’t a game-ender. Not like he had internal organs anybody could hurt. Perforate his spleen? Puncture his lung? Explode his heart? Eh. Whatever. He wasn’t using them. They were just dusty meat inside his dead body anyhow.

But his bones.

He needed those. They were his support system. If one part of his body held particular importance, it was his skeleton.

Disrupt the skeleton—with perhaps a shotgun slug to the kneecaps or rifle-rounds to the bones that held his arms together—and things got a lot more difficult. Especially since healing for him was not immediate: bones took a while to knit or regrow. Like slow osseous crystals forming from a bed of salt and calcium.

But even that was not Coburn’s biggest problem.

His problem right now? The dog kennel.

Soon as the old man—whose name, as it turned out, was simply ‘Grandpaw’—finished hole-punching Coburn’s body with rifle rounds, the other two cannibals shoved Coburn’s broken, legless body into the pet carrier. Though, not before the taller, stooped-over cannibal stripped him of his leather jacket—now perforated with holes—and put it on.

It was barely big enough. His leg stumps thrust up against the back of the kennel, and that was again a cruel reminder that he could not violate the laws of physics. Much as he wanted, without room to grow his legs, they would not grow. No legs meant he couldn’t dismantle this thing.

And his blood was swiftly leaving his body through the many holes and two stumps. Given that blood was a necessity when it came time to heal up, it meant he couldn’t heal his arms, couldn’t tear the door off this carrier, couldn’t do squat. He tried to will his body to retain the blood, to harness it and channel it—but it wasn’t happening. With every moment, a darker shadow of desperation drifted over him.

Wyatt and Stevie—the tall one who stole his jacket was Wyatt, the earless buttplug was Stevie—hooked the carrier up to a chain, then started dragging it across the busted-up tile floor of the Wal-Mart. Grandpaw wheeled alongside as Coburn struggled to make something, anything, happen.

“Shit,” Grandpaw said, peering in through the side holes. The word came out as shee-yit. “You still alive in there? After all that? You must be some goddamn miracle food. Ambrosia might make you a meal all for herself.”

Coburn tried to curse the old man out, but all that came out was a ragged whisper and a mouthful of blood. A bullet must’ve clipped him in the throat.

Grandpaw had one thing right:

Shit.

 

They heard gunfire. A couple booms, then several pop, pop, pops.

“Was that it?” Ebbie asked. “Was that the signal?”

“I don’t know,” Leelee answered.

Kayla nursed on a juice box, nervously chewing the straw. “I bet that was it. I bet that was the signal. He said we’d know.”

“But we don’t know,” Ebbie said. Leelee looked to her with eyes uncertain, eyes lost and wandering.

They’d been orbiting a strip mall parking lot for the last hour, leading a small but growing band of the undead around in circles. It was like herding cats with a laser pointer. But once the gunfire started off in the distance, about half of them broke away from the pack and started staggering off toward the Wal-Mart. That was how they were: creatures of stimulus and response.

“I think it could’ve been it,” Kayla insisted.

Gil came up behind them in the front of the mobile home. Jaw tight as he chewed on sunflower seeds. “That wasn’t it. We need a bigger opening than that. That distraction wasn’t more than a couple mouse farts.” He spit seed hulls into a paper cup. “We wait.”

“But—” Kayla started.

“I said, we wait.”

 

“Bring me the meat.”

He pressed his face against the cage of the carrier, and his first thought was, That body must contain blood in the gallon, not the pint.

Ambrosia, the Cannibal Queen of the Man-Eating Wal-Mart, was easily eight hundred pounds. She did not sit so much as allow her fat to sprawl out across a dais made from shipping pallets, six-packs of soda, and various repurposed ottomans. Her ‘throne room’ was framed by a niche of flat-screen televisions (this was, after all, the electronics department). While none of the televisions had electricity, on each was painted a garish and frankly amateurish portrait of Ambrosia in greasy colors.

Incense burned—ghostly serpents of scented smoke coiled around her head. But it did little to mask the smell: Ambrosia’s stink was wretched. Had Coburn tears in his head, his eyes would be leaking. The odor was some mind-boggling combination of rotten onions, rancid lunchmeat and sweat-soaked gym socks.

Basically, she smelled like human garbage.

Wyatt and Stevie dragged the vampire kennel up to the edge of the dais, then lifted it up with a groan and placed it before their fleshy mistress.

Ambrosia struggled, grunting as she leaned over her own prodigious flesh, and stared into the kennel. Coburn bit at the grate like a rabid animal. It didn’t work. His strength was swiftly waning.

Next to him, he heard the squeaks of Grandpaw’s wheelchair.

“Ooooh. He’s feisty,” Ambrosia said, chuckling. Her words and chortles sounded like someone had stuffed her throat with pudding. Gargling, gurgling. And her breath could’ve choked a hyena.

“Shot him plenty of times,” Grandpaw said, sucking air through his teeth. “But there he is, still kicking like that battery bunny what used to be on TV.”

“I want him for breakfast.” She licked her rubbery lips.

“You want him raw?”

“Sashimi,” she corrected. “We must strive to be civilized, Grandpaw. We are creatures of the world.”

“’Course, what was I thinking?” In his voice, Coburn could hear the man’s dismissal—he didn’t give one whit about this woman or what she was saying, but put up with it because clearly she was the one with the power. Was it just her size that convinced others? How the hell was she so damn big? Coburn decided to ask.

“How—” he started, his voice croaking. He pushed past vocal cords that felt like broken glass: “How the hell are you… so… fucking… fat?”

“My breakfast speaks!” Ambrosia said, her voice a high-pitched twitter. She clapped her hands together, hands that were actually quite small, like doll’s hands. “My dear, I have a most undesirable metabolic disorder.” She studied his face, saw it wrinkle up in disbelief. “I’m just kidding! Human meat is wonderfully complex and fatty.” She leaned in and whispered, as if confiding a secret: “I eat a lot of people. And soon I’m going to eat you, little rabbit.”

She pulled back from the cage.

“I want most of him cooked,” she declared, as if ordering a chef to do her bidding. “Take him to the roof and roast him over the spit. But. But! I would like a raw preparation of sashimi to precede my meal. Also, if any of his back-fat remains, I require a lardon of man-bacon.”

Ambrosia flapped her little hand in a wave of dismissal. Her arm-fat shook with the motion, like a sandbag full of gelatin.

As the cage withdrew, Grandpaw wheeled up and presented her with something. Coburn saw that it was one of his feet.

“An appetizer if’n you want it,” the old man said.

She took it like a buttery cob of hot corn, shucked the boot and rolled back the pant leg—

Then took a big wet bite.

As the pet carrier rounded an endcap away from the electronics department, away from Ambrosia’s throne room, he could hear the moans of delight, the smacking of her lips, the pleasurable sighs blown through her nostrils as she chowed down on the vampire’s flesh.

He hoped he tasted good, at least.